A New Aristocracy

								

comprehend and fearless to execute. Yet hers was by no means a masculine
or an ugly face. Though strongly marked, there was still an indefinable
attraction in the warm depths of her blue eyes and the smile of her
mobile and sympathetic mouth. She was, withal, strangely wholesome to
look upon; one of those rare beings, as it came afterward to be said of
her, whose faces rest you as calm waters and green fields rest eyes that
are blinded with the dust and turmoil of the city’s streets. In figure
she was tall, with that breadth of shoulder and hip which indicates
endurance, free and graceful in her movements, apt in her utterances,
and unusually keen in her intuitions. At the time of her father’s death
she was twenty-four years of age, thoughtful even beyond her years. Hers
had been a hard school. Poverty prematurely sharpens wits and generates
ambition, and ever since her earliest recollection she had witnessed the
daily pinchings and privations of stern necessity. Questioning often
with wondering eyes and grave thought, she had early learned to strive
against this oppressor of her household; but the best of effort had only
kept the lean wolf of hunger from the door. The father, wedded to
abstruse speculation and erudite research, had not that talent for
money-getting which is expected of the “working parsons” of country
villages; and though the mother had been possessed of uncommon tact,
meagreness in every detail of Margaret’s physical growth had always
confronted her. Not so intellectually, however. The bond of sympathy
between parents and children had always been strong, and in the
communion of thought the barren home life was lifted into realms of
peace and plenty. Nobody remembered how Margaret learned to read. The
faculty seemed to come with her growth, like her teeth, and almost as
soon as she had mastered the rudiments of reading, her father delighted
to feed the grave little head with as much of the mental pabulum upon
which he feasted as the infantile brain could digest. Her capacity
proved something like that of the sponge, growing receptive in
proportion as it was fed, and when at eighteen she was vouchsafed a year
of school life at a church institution, she astonished both faculty and
pupils by disclosing such an odd mixture of knowledge as no other pupil
had ever brought to the school. Latin and Greek were far more familiar
to her than fractions, and the geography of the Holy Land an open page
beside the study of her own state and its form of government. Her
aptitude for language was wonderful, and her ability for philosophical
reasoning much beyond her years. She achieved marvels of learning in the
one short year, only at its expiration to be called away by the sad
announcement of her mother’s mortal sickness. She reached home in time
to comfort the anxious heart with the promise to keep always a home for
the loved ones left behind. For five years she had faithfully fulfilled